


like the stars miss the sun in the morning sky

by SbiderSlut (BlackCoffeeCat)



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Developing Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hate to Love, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Love, Use of BARF Technology, and obvs they fight about that, only peterxharley happens, they are both in unrequited love with tony
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-08 13:04:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18623842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCoffeeCat/pseuds/SbiderSlut
Summary: Peter and Harley: first meetings and beyond.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is heavily based on Endgame spoilers. If you don't want the movie spoiled, don't read any further than here! :) 
> 
> Here's the premise which made me write this at 5AM after watching Endgame and feeling utterly wrecked: Harley and Peter meet after Tony's funeral, as both of them are trapped in their grief and still unable to let go of him. Both boys loved him, in every way they were expected to, and in ways they shouldn't. Mix that with their resentment towards one another at first glance, liberal (unhealthy) use of a BARF device as a coping mechanism, and their desperation to keep every last memory of Tony alive. This is a hate-at-first-sight fic with a happy ending. 
> 
> Also, writing this is gonna help me cope with the movie tbh.
> 
> Title is from Summertime Sadness by Lana Del Rey.

Peter fights the urge to cry when FRIDAY faithfully slides open the lab doors at his presence. (Five years. Tony had kept Peter’s access registered for five years.)

Peter fights to keep his breath as stepping into Tony Stark’s empty lab feels like walking into a home that’s been robbed of every last object in it. (What’s the joy in the millions of dollars worth of tech and toys, if Tony’s not there to enjoy it with him?)

Peter fights the urge to crumble apart. If he weren’t on a mission…

But he is.

And clearly, someone else is, too.

“Can I help you?” Peter asks, and the grief is still too near; he can’t bring himself to care about the harshness of his tone.

The other _kid_ \-- he’s gotta be no more than a few years older -- looks up from where he’s rifling through a cabinet, and levels Peter with a rather hostile expression. “Can I help _you_?”

 _He’s that one from the funeral_ , Peter thinks. He doesn’t remember much, but he _does_ remember the pounding of his head as he tried to swallow down tears in a futile battle. He remembers glancing up at a vague blur of blonde hair and blue eyes, someone his age. He remembers seeing tears on this other boy’s cheeks, and thinking,  _it’s alright_ , and finally allowing his own shattered heart to trickle down his cheeks in clear rivulets.

“How do you have access to this lab?” Peter questions, feeling his stomach twist. _Why did Tony give you access to the lab we shared?_

“How do _you_ have access to this lab?” this kid parrots back again, before he shakes his head of blonde curls and adds, “I’m sorry, who even _are_ you?”

“I’m Peter Parker, who are _you_?”

“Harley Keener.”

“Oh,” Peter then says, chest emptying of any righteousness. “Harley Keener from Rose Hill.” He can’t breathe, choked with how he resents the other boy, still. Even if he has no grounds to do so. When will this bitterness leave him?

“Yep, that one,” the other boy says, and his attitude makes Peter want to throw something.

“I thought you’d be younger. You’re younger than me, right?”

“Not anymore. Five years makes a big difference.”   

And _oh_. Peter thinks to the five years this Harley Keener got to spend with Tony -- five years more than Peter’s briefest of reunions, and he clenches his jaw at the sting of tears. “I guess it makes sense you probably have lab access, then.”

“Yup, and I see you have yours, somehow.”

By some... _grace_ \-- Peter would say _miracle_ if he could still believe in them -- Peter holds back tidal waves of nasty sentiments he’s just dying to spit. There’s just so much pain, so much anger at the universe, so much targetless hatred and rage that’s just begging for an undeserving target, and in the end, he simply decides that the person who would let all those vicious barbs fly is not the type of person he wants to be.

Nor the type of person Tony would want him to be.

_I wanted you to be better._

_And I wanted the chance to show you I could._

Why, oh _why_ , couldn’t he have had some more time? Just a little bit. Or, why couldn’t he have been less pathetic and stupid with his words? None of it was enough -- not enough time; not enough eloquence -- there’s so much Peter needed to say that he didn’t.

 _This is nice_? He could have said literally anything else. Fucking anything.

He could have hugged back tighter.

 _We won_? And the pathetic blubbers he dissolved into? What kind of a jackass must he be to waste such precious moments spewing worthlessness? Tony’s last memories of Peter, and they’re of him crying like a small child.

“Yeah, looks like it,” Peter chokes out, squeezing past the sensation of being strangled.

There’s a pause, where Harley regards Peter, and Peter stares back, and it’s obvious. They’re both tempering the urge to greedily snatch these last remnants of Tony for themselves. To boot the other boy away.

It’s not what Tony would have wanted, but it’s how deep their love runs.

Too deep, that is. 

Peter knows his own feelings, and sees it reflected in the other boy.

“You, too, huh?” Harley mutters, bitterly, and Peter can only nod.

Tony Stark is too easy of a man to love.

Harley averts his eyes. “I’ll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine,” he offers.

That’s about as good of an arrangement that Peter’s going to get, he thinks. “Deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of this is probably gonna be in relatively short chapters. Thanks for reading, and comments are truly appreciated <3 <3


	2. Chapter 2

Harley’s around the corner doing god-knows-what; Peter can hear distinct rustling and it’s driving him mad, but he also has an objective -- he needs something. He can’t be bothered to think about Harley right now.

Oh, does he need this thing, so much. _Please_ , he begs, to a god he can’t help but resent, _don’t let Mr. Stark have retired this project in the past five years._

He leans over the armrest of the couch and wrenches at the drawer of a side table, only to find it's locked.

 _A locked drawer in the most secured lab in the state, if not the entire coast_. He pauses, licks his lips, and thinks that maybe this is it. Maybe he’s hit gold. Maybe this is where Tony would sit with the TV on and tinker, and then try. Tinker, and try.

They’d all seen the broadcasted seminar where Tony had projected his memories into a lifelike state. Cutting edge technology -- the world was in awe. Peter was in awe.

What would Tony have projected? Peter doesn’t dare hope so, but perhaps Tony had…?

If so -- and he tries his very best not to assume anything, lest he face additional shattering disappointment -- which memories had Tony chosen? Staten Island? Germany? Those last few moments on Titan? Which had he simply re-lived? Which had he actively _changed_ \-- and in what ways?

Peter wrenches and wrenches at the drawer like a feral animal, until the sides crumple and the metal gives a groan; it rips open with a sickening screech.

Loud as it is, it doesn’t mask the strangled noise Peter makes as he sees the actual contents of the locked drawer.

“If you’re looking for what I am, you’re not gonna find it there,” Harley tells him, flatly. “That was just for him. He wouldn’t let me near it. Wouldn’t let anyone near it. The lab caught fire once and he picked up the entire table and lugged it out. What’s in it, anyway?”

Peter barely hears him.

He catches just enough of a glimpse inside the drawer before his vision blurs with tears. “Oh,” he whispers, fingers skimming over papers and trinkets and all sorts of ridiculous junk. His fingers gently trace a broken test tube shard with dried blood on the edge. 

He remembers the stinging cut the first time around, merely a day before Titan, and he's careful not to cut himself this time.

He looks down in the drawer -- a drawer crammed to the brim with _his_ things, and the first thought is that it looks like some case of _Hoarders_ , except concentrated to one select containment unit.

It’s _all_ there. The wrench he liked to use, the papers he wrote, even shitty little doodles he can just manage to make out through the blurriness -- spider webs and inaccurate molecular structure and stick figures kicking ass.

He uncrumples some random paper ball of web-fluid scribbles and stares down at it in a daze until the ink starts to inexplicably run in blotches. He blinks, only to have more droplets of hot tears hit the paper and trickle along the odd edges and creases.

Tony had kept all of it. Even his trash.

“It’s my stuff,” he says.

“Your stuff?”

“Just like...” Papers. Trinkets. A cracked Lego Star Wars figure. Everything he’d used or touched. It’s as if someone had taken every last possible trace of Peter and carefully salvaged it, tucked it away it for safekeeping. Locked it and kept it for themselves.

Peter doesn’t finish his answer; he drops the crinkled paper, buries his face in his hands, and sobs and sobs and _sobs_.

Tony had kept him around. He’d not forgotten, in all those years.

When Peter finally looks up from his dampened hands, Harley’s gone.

\---

“What did you think I was looking for?” Peter asks, later on, as he tries to get the coffee machine to function. It just _won’t_ \-- it’s an entirely different machine from the one Peter had known all those years ago, and it makes his throat close up. The world had moved forward -- Mr. Stark had moved forward.

Mr. Stark had moved forward with Harley Keener from Rose Hill, Tennessee.

And Peter had been left behind.

( _Yes_ , it’s incredibly unfair of him to think that, especially with how Mr. Stark had given his life to bring back everyone who’d been erased. Especially with the drawer he’d just spilled open, filled to the brim with him and only him. He’d very clearly _not_ been forgotten. And to keep thinking in such a heinous way is the worst type of selfish and disrespectful. But, Peter can’t stop the bitterness any more than he can stop Death and its mission to take and take and _take_.)

“ _BARF_ ,” Harley mutters from the kitchen bar as he works through a plate of eggs and waffles he’d fixed up. He leans on his elbows and stares at Peter, gaze hardened and challenging. “It’s what _I’m_ looking for.”

In a few wolfish bites, Harley clears his plate and moves smoothly to the other side of the kitchen -- deposits his dirty plate in a contraption, a minimalist slot cut into the counter. He drops his silverware in another. He opens the fridge and grabs a beer, reflexively flips the top with a groove on the fridge. “Help yourself to the fridge and pantry, I guess.”

Peter bites his tongue. _Who gave you the right?_

He _hates_ it. Hates how a space that was once _home_ is now anything but. Hates how it's now someone else's home. Hates how every little thing only serves to remind him of how out of place he is, and that the one man who would have helped him acclimate is fucking _gone_. Hates how someone else is giving him permission to help himself to a fridge he’d once unashamedly emptied.

Hates how he somehow pathetically  _needs_ this permission. 

Everything which had once been familiar to him is now foreign.

And all he fucking wants is a damn cup of coffee.

By all means, he should be cried out -- he’d bawled for too long before. But still, frustrated tears manage to trickle their way down his cheeks as the machine does _absolutely zilch,_  no matter what buttons are pressed. Tears fall, and Peter thinks that in a fair world, Mr. Stark would be here to introduce him to the new world, to show him how to use this new machine that he's sure is actually delightful and fun.

But Mr. Stark is not.

As Peter rushes out, Harley remains slouched against the fridge, head back, drinking his stupid beer.

\---

It pours as Peter steps onto the open balcony to breathe the outdoors air. He’s suffocating, otherwise. Can’t draw breath -- not when his chest is being crushed under a thousand times the weight of that Brooklyn warehouse. Not when his heart is shattered into a pile of crumbs.

He doesn’t bother with an umbrella. He stands there and lets the cold rain soak into his hair, drip down the back of his collar. He lets it trickle down his face and sting into his eyes, and he accepts it, thinking that it's _only right_. The _least_ the world could do is weep for Tony Stark.

It’s what Tony deserves.

And if the world sheds tears for Tony Stark? Peter Parker would only hope to drown in it.

\---

Behind him, the glass door slides open, and stays open for a moment, contemplative.

Peter holds his breath; he refuses to turn around. He can hear the breathing behind him, hear the exact moment a body turns away again, changing their mind.  

The door slides shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think! 
> 
> \---
> 
> I am [SbiderSlut](http://sbiderslut.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. Come by and say hi, or cry about Endgame with me 💖💕


End file.
